Monbooru

Monbooru is a single-binary, self-hosted gallery for a personal image collection, built around the booru conventions that anime and AI-art collectors already use: tag categories with aliases and implications, a general-to-explicit rating scale with a configurable SFW ceiling, ratings, favourites, saved searches, collections and a search syntax with wildcards, OR and exclusions. Images, video, animated GIFs and CBZ/ZIP archives stay as ordinary files and folders on disk, while a per-gallery SQLite database holds tags, relations and thumbnails. Removing monbooru leaves your files exactly where they were.

It is aimed squarely at local media libraries rather than phone-camera rollups. Stable Diffusion metadata from A1111/Forge and ComfyUI (prompts, models, seeds, full workflows) is read and shown per image, and local ONNX taggers such as WD14 SwinV2, animetimm EVA02, JoyTag, Camie v2 and PixAI can label the collection on CPU or GPU without sending anything off the machine. A file watcher picks up new, moved and deleted files within seconds, SHA-256 hashing keeps one file from becoming two entries, and declared relations plus near-duplicate detection with a side-by-side review session handle alternates, version chains and duplicates.

The core app never touches the internet. Downloading from boorus and reverse image lookup (IQDB, SauceNAO, Hydrus Public Tag Repository) happen through the optional monloader companion, with a browser extension (monsender) for sending the page you are on. Compared with cloud photo services such as Google Photos or iCloud Photos, there is no storage subscription and no upload, but also no mobile apps or automatic camera backup. Compared with a paid desktop catalogue like Eagle, you get booru-style tagging, an inbox review workflow and a documented REST API, and you host it yourself instead of licensing a seat.

Highlights

• Tag-based gallery with folder tree, ratings, favourites, saved searches and collections
• Local ONNX auto-tagging (WD14, EVA02, JoyTag, Camie v2, PixAI) on CPU or GPU, with per-model tag provenance
• Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI metadata, including full generation workflows
• Manga reader for CBZ/ZIP archives, plus video, GIF and animated hover previews on the grid
• Batch operations across a selection or a whole search: delete, move, tag, auto-tag, set collection
• Multiple galleries per instance, each with its own filesystem and database, with export/import
• REST API under /api/v1 with scoped tokens, OpenAPI spec and built-in docs; plugin and theme support
• Optional password login; intended for local network use, not public exposure